Here’s how you can get it:

1. Install Chromifox Basic.

OK, this part is totally optional. I just like the blue look. You can skip this step, so I guess this guide is really six steps.

2. Get rid of unnecessary buttons.

Right-click in the toolbar area and choose “Customize.” Drag everything you don’t want into the box that pops up to get rid of it. I even got rid of my Home button, although not everyone will want to.

3. Install Stylish and the Combine Stop/Reload Buttons style.

This will make Stop and Reload one button to further reduce the number of buttons.

4. Install Fission.

This turns your address bar into a progress bar.

5. Install URL Tooltip.

This lets you see URLs of links by hovering over them.

Once you have this and Fission, you no longer need the Status bar. Hide it by unchecking it under the “View” menu.

6. Set up Firefox to quickly search the Web from the address bar.

On the dropdown menu of your search box, choose Manage Search Engines.

Here you can assign a keyword to each search engine. For example, if you assign the keyword “g” to Google, you simply have to type “g [your search term]” in the address bar to search Google.

Since there’s no more need for a search box, you can get rid of it just like you got rid of your other buttons in step No. 2.

7. Ditch all the toolbars except the navigation bar.

Right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck everything except “Navigation Toolbar.”

If you need the menu bar, you can hit the “Alt” key to temporarily show it again. You won’t need the bookmarks menu because you can simply search for your bookmarks in the address bar, also called the Awesome Bar.

That’s it!

If you need a bookmark or a Web history entry, start typing it into the Awesome Bar and let Firefox find it for you. If you need the menu bar, just press Alt.

Clean and uncluttered.

In a nutshell, WSJ.com has some articles where you can only read the first few paragraphs for free before being prompted to subscribe.

However, you can read these same articles for free by coming to them via Google or Google News. I’ve made a Web browser bookmarklet that speeds up the process a bit.

The normal process without the bookmarklet involves a few steps:

• Go to the article and see that it’s restricted to subscribers
• Copy the headline
• Go to Google.com
• Enter the headline (and a site:wsj.com for good measure)
• Search
• Click the resulting link

Firefox users can simplify it somewhat:

• Go to the article
• Highlight the headline
• Right-click the headline and choose “Search Google for…”
• Click the resulting link

However, when you do this, WSJ.com isn’t always the first result (I keep getting Yahoo! News results), hence the benefit of a WSJ.com-specific search.

In the spirit of being really lazy efficiency, I have made a Javascript bookmarklet that shaves a few steps off.

It’s not perfect though. Ideally, you could go to the WSJ article, click the bookmarklet and go straight to the full version.

This bookmarklet is a step removed:

• Go to the article
• Click the bookmarklet, which pulls up a WSJ.com-specific Google search for the headline
• Click the resulting link

It works by using Javascript to extract the article’s headline from its h1 tag and perform a WSJ.com-specific Google search for that headline.

This should ensure that the first search result is the article in question, although it might not be perfect.

(In fact, if the article is not yet indexed in Google, it won’t work at all. So there’s that.)

If anyone knows how to make it go that final step of essentially clicking through to the Google search result using Javascript, please let me know. I am not sure it’s possible, however; I think WSJ.com might check the HTTP referrer to see if you are coming from Google, and I don’t think you can spoof that with Javascript (though you can get Firefox add-ons that do it).

So what’s the point of all this? It was mainly a Javascript bookmarklet exercise for me, and if it does save someone a little bit of hassle by removing a few steps from the process of reading WSJ, that’s very good. It’s not stealing from the WSJ; after all, the paper’s Web site allows readers coming from Google to read for free. This just expedites the process.

Anyway, here is the bookmarklet.

Firefox users, drag the button below to your browser’s Bookmarks toolbar. Internet Explorer users, right-click it and choose “Add to Favorites.”

Then go to a Wall Street Journal article and click the button.

[WSJ->Google]

Questions? Comments? Leave me a comment!

If you click an article headline while browsing WSJ.com, you may get the first few paragraphs and a note asking you to subscribe (this is what Murdoch calls a paywall “not right to the ceiling”).

But if you come to an article via Google, you can read the whole thing for free.

So if you find an article you like, just search for the headline in Google and, for good measure, add “site:wsj.com” to restrict it to the Wall Street Journal site.

Click the headline in the search result and — hey! no paywall.

You can make the process even easier by bookmarking this link – It’s a Google News page filtered to show stories from the Wall Street Journal.

Oh, and this isn’t new. It’s been an open secret since at least March 2008.

Many Gannett newspaper sites now split long articles up onto multiple pages. However, if you look at the page’s source code, it actually loads the entire article in your browser but splits it into several divs, showing you only one at a time.

There is no benefit to the reader by doing this. From a readability standpoint, subheads splitting up the text into chunks would work much better. I assume the reason for it is to get multiple page views for a single article.

Reclaim the user experience

Thanks to Web browser add-ons, Web site users can modify the way Web pages are displayed. We can then show all of the article’s divs at once without having to click to see the next one.

Download the Gannett newspaper site anti-pagination user style here.

It requires either (a) the Firefox browser with either the Stylish or Greasemonkey add-ons, or (b) the Opera browser. It’s free.

Reporter Meranda Watling has written more about the pagination issue.

The fix works on these sites. If you would like more Gannett sites added to it, please let me know by leaving a comment here.

When you add a bookmark, you can give it a label, much like how you can label e-mails in Gmail.

Then, when you click the toolbar button to access your bookmarks, Google Toolbar shows the labels sorted by either alphabetical order or by date modified.

What if you use alphabetical sorting (the default), but you want some labels out of alphabetical order — say, to add a few categories near the top so you can find them more quickly?

Simple! Just add a minus sign or an asterisk in front of the label name.

If you want to send a label to the bottom of the list, try the little-used tilde (~) character in front of a label.

Each of the various keyboard characters has a different rank in the hierarchy; I don’t know all of them. There is probably a chart somewhere that lists the order of all the characters.

I know that a minus sign is above an asterisk, which is above the letter A, and a tilde puts anything under the normal A-Z order.

Beyond that, just try experimenting to see which ones you like best.